Find Files Installed by Yum

Yum is great isn’t it? All you do is tell it the name of the program or library and off it goes, installing files all over your computer, ready for you to use at the drop of a hat.

However, sometimes it’s nice to know a little bit more about what yum is up to. Have you ever found yourself hunting all over your hard drive, trying to find exactly where yum has installed something?

Me too.

Well, if you do ever need to quiz yum, the following commands will allow you to gather all the knowledge you need on what your latest install has done.

As with pretty much everything on Linux, yum keeps a record of what it does. This record lives in:

/var/log/yum.log

So you could take a look in this file and see what packages were installed on what date.

But wait!

Yum itself has a history command, so you can also see this information in a much prettier way by typing:

yum history

And then using the ID in the left column to get more information about each record:

yum history info 24

Finally, and most importantly, what if you need to know where yum has installed all the files from your latest update?

Well, yum uses rpm for installation, so you can use it to query the package, like this:

rpm -ql eclipse-cdt

Which will give you a list of the full path to every file that was installed onto your computer for the package in question (I’ve used eclipse-cdt, but obviously you can ask it about anything you’ve installed).